i just can't wait to get on the road again...

I've driven to Boston, stayed for less than 24 hours, and driven back. I've driven home from the Bay State leaving after midnight, pulling over to sleep in front of a rest stop parking lot outside of a Starbucks, and made it on time to work at a Barnes and Noble in New Jersey by 7:30am. I've been through more states in a weekend than some people have been to in their lives. Once, I drove north for 6 hours with no radio in my car. I sang most of the time and cursed the annoyingly catchy song (by the Barenaked Ladies that they used to play at work at least once every ten minutes) that I couldn't drive from my head or remember all of the words to. But I've never done what I'm doing over the next two weeks.

On Thursday, immediately following the Poetry & Drama Quiz I'm administering to my Experiencing Lit students, I will be driving to Boston. Gigantic Sequins has an event celebrating the winter release of our 3.1 issue, featuring four great fiction writers, three of whom are featured in the new issue, one from 2.2. I am making the trip to visit my lovely friend Elise, who will be introducing a little boy to the world some time next month. I am hoping that he and I will share a birthday. Then, on Saturday, Gigantic Sequins is taking part in the resurrected reading series, Dirty Water, featuring readers from four other literary ventures: Redivider, Boston Review, Madras Press & Black Ocean. I'll be driving home Sunday morning to host an intimate Oscars gathering Sunday night. (I'm rooting for The Artist as Best Picture).

But that's not it. Tuesday, immediately following my Experiencing Literature class (we're reading our first short stories for that day and going over some "Elements of Fiction"), I'm getting in my car once again. This time, I am driving to Chicago for the AWP conference. I chose not to fly for various reasons, none of which are that I am afraid of flying (I'm not.) But I also didn't realize it was a 13 hour trip when I failed to buy a plane ticket. I have a lot to lug for the magazine, and... I've always wanted to take a road trip! I never imagined, though, it would be a solo drive. I'm selectively burning CDs for the trip, mixes and full albums. I am scoping out when and where I may wind up stopping over night. And I am asking lots of Chicagoans about parking. I think I am more worried about having to drive home alone 13 hours straight than I am about driving there.

(Sequined bunny mask I perhaps may be wearing at the AWP bookfair at one point or another.)

AWP was in DC last year, a much shorter trip, but I am glad to be going again this year. We are sharing our table with some of the best people in the litmag scene, the folks who run Big Lucks. Geoff is going to help me to design a table cloth for our half of the table with various things we bought from a Philly Fabric Outlet. And Big Lucks and Gigantic Sequins have a reading at Beauty Bar along with Rose Metal Press, Knee-Jerk, and Magic Helicopter Press titled "Before We Go".

The drive to and from Chicago is pretty much a straight shot. I am probably going to need a straight-up shot of something after I arrive, but I am up for the adventure. I look forward to donning black & white, chatting with fans of our journal, and meeting contributors whose work I know in print, but whose faces I have not yet met in person. Stop by Table O10, the Gigantic Sequins / Big Lucks table to say hello if you will also be in Chicago during the conference!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

June 5, 2010 :: elegy in essay form I found out this morning via Jim Behrle's facebook and then his twitter that David Markson has passed away. "David Markson has died." Behrle doesn't blither. Quick search on the web, and I've got nothing, but this makes sense to me. Markson, a giant of postmodernism-- if you're true to the word-- maintained closer friendships than he courted publicity. His life and work are intertwined, and his memory will live on in those he touched as well as in his works of art. Perhaps I find my method of discovery at his passing ironic considering Markson himself would have never found out about anything the way I did. He would tell me, visiting the poetry and literary non-fiction stacks of Strand Bookstore, how he still used a typewriter to write, wrote things down on notecards when planning his novels, only took calls on his landline and didn't feel he had any need for a cell phone or computer. It wasn't that he was against tec…

I've been on a mission to watch as many movies that came out in 2017 as possible, and I decided earlier to create a series of blog posts within which I review two that I've seen. So far I have seen 7, so there will be some catching up. I'll be rating them using my own made up system of pluses, minuses, & other marks of punctuation, including but not limited to exclamation points, parentheses, exponents, & more.

LADY BIRD (contains spoilers)
There is little to dislike about this coming-of-age film set in the early 2000s in California. Lady Bird is well-written, well-acted, and features extremely sympathetic and at times relatable (esp. if you grew up during the birth of the internet and came of age during the heydays of AIM) characters, Lady Bird/Christine herself and her friend Julia being the two I rooted for the most. Lady Bird, however, despite her self-inflicted oddness and ownership of it at the Catholic High School she seemingly happily attends, does have som…

I made the mistake this semester of taking three classes and auditing one. Even though I didn't have to do the coursework for the one I audited, just the reading/participation, it was still too much. I didn't have time to do things that I normally like to do, that are important to me--let alone things that I do generally because I do them. Such as.... writing about the books I read.

HERE are all the books I read from February-April during this semester, excluding re-reads, with brief snippets of thoughts after them...

FEBRUARYCaligula by Albert CamusThe Visit by Friedrich Dürrenmatt
For my drama class, we read these two plays the same week. I preferred the Dürrenmatt because the characters were more interesting to me, particularly Claire, the cruel/eccentric/wealthy woman who returns to her hometown for revenge. Caligula was interesting to me in terms of it as an existential retelling of an old story, but the characters blended more easily.